An exhibition about creating meanings with space and nature

Michael Burke’s rich oil paintings on wood create an intimate moment with nature. In viewing the small scale works surrounded by wide home-made frames, including pieces from an old guitar, one feels that they have been on a walk with the artist, just over the hill from his home in rural Petersburgh, New York. His finely textured surfaces stimulate more than one sense — the snow is deep and crusty, the woods dense and moist as you move through each of the seasons. These works are like old friends and the quiet places we all wish we could visit more often.

Katia Gushue’s primary art form consists of nature based, large-scale charcoal drawings on stretched canvas, sealed for permanence. Forests, trees, rivers and ferns provide the shapes she uses to express her experience of nature as transformative. She uses hundreds of photographs from her summers in Vermont and New Paltz woods which she projects directly on to the canvas, interpreting the colors into tonal values, allowing her to explore mechanical reproduction and personal, abstract mark-making. Her work is influenced by photo-realism’s use of photography, scale and tension between illusionistic and flat space.

Susan Miiller’s landscape paintings explore the relationships between multiple sources of imagery and the meanings which are created when cut-up and recollaged photographs are used to invent new compositions. The work is at the same time about the technique, the paint and the imagery. Her subtractive painting method unifies the disparate imagery and creates dramatic modulations of color and space. Together with a wide variety of painterly techniques, she obtains a physical presence of surface that underscores the beauty of the painted surfaces. Her paintings begin as abstract color fields, that are overpainted, with the subsequent layer of paint stripped away revealing classical landscapes.

Eleanor Sweeney’s experimentive, soft focused Polaroid transfers reflect a sensitivity to her wooded lake surroundings. She uses multiple images to reflect the variations in a subject, the changing light, the endless perspectives and the passage of time. She has moved from small scale black and white contact prints to larger colorful images, printed on watercolor papers, silk and other fabrics. She sometimes combines full scenes with a vast area of just one thing, color or water or sky — to create a fuller sense of the place and the experience. Her new work is based on her recent trip to Iceland.

— Colleen Skiff